A Cow's Dream

I'm going to try to post more regularly now. Although I just had my camera sent in to be fixed... Oh well. This is another shot from our California trip that is up north on the coast in wine country. I've been playing with different creative filters lately. This is a preset that I downloaded from Matt Kloskowski's web site and modified a little.

I have finally developed a workflow that I think I can use to help me get more consistent results without bumbling around between photoshop and lightroom like a goof. I shoot all RAW and I manage all my photos in lightroom. After I select which photos I'm going to work on in lightroom I go through the develope module pretty much from top to bottom. I apply no sharpening or noise reduction there. Then I edit a 16 bit prophoto RGB tiff in photoshop. I apply noise ninja first. If I haven't done much to the image I use the camera profiles from their website. Otherwise I will manually profile the image. Then I use capture sharpening from pixel genius called photokit sharpener. This is a very mild sharpening that helps correct some of the softening from the raw conversion. Here is where I do all the photshop work. Sometimes I just get rid of a little dust and I'm on my way, other times I spend quite a bit of time here. When I get the image to where I like it I usually convert to an 8 bit and sRGB colorspace. The 8 bit allows me to use more of the photoshop filters and the sRGB takes up less space (The lab where I go uses sRGB only) When I'm done I save this file back to lightroom and group it with the original RAW image. Now if I want to post the image online or get a print I find the image in lightroom and open it in photoshop. Here I change the size of the image, use output sharpening depending on where its going and then if I'm going to post it online, I have an action that I use to put a border around it. I then save this file somewhere else because every application and size of the final print needs a different file.

Canon 350D (RAW)
1/200 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100
41mm (17.0-50.0mm f/2.8 Tamron)

Adjustments made in Lightroom:
- Used 'Matt's Sin City - Dark Red' preset
- Then adjusted Levels, Crop, Tone Curve, Clarity, HSL and saturation

Adjustments made in Photoshop:
- Noise Ninja, and Photokit Capture sharpening
- Duplicate background layer using the multiply blend, then lowered the opacity
- Further adjusted levels, brightness and contrast